This handbook offers students and researchers a compact introduction to the nineteenth-century American novel in the light of current debates, theoretical concepts, and critical methodologies. The volume turns to the nineteenth century as a formative era in American literary history, a time that saw both the rise of the novel as a genre, and the emergence of an independent, confident American culture. A broad range of concise essays by European and American scholars demonstrates how some of America‘s most well-known and influential novels responded to and participated in the radical transformations that characterized American culture between the early republic and the age of imperial expansion. Part I consists of 7 systematic essays on key historical and critical frameworks ― including debates aboutrace and citizenship, transnationalism, environmentalism and print culture, as well as sentimentalism, romance and the gothic, realism and naturalism. Part II provides 22 essays on individual novels, each combining an introduction to relevant cultural contexts with a fresh close reading and the discussion of critical perspectives shaped by literary and cultural theory.

This handbook offers students and researchers a compact introduction to the nineteenth-century American novel in the light of current debates, theoretical concepts, and critical methodologies. The volume turns to the nineteenth century as a formative era in American literary history, a time that saw both the rise of the novel as a genre, and the emergence of an independent, confident American culture. A broad range of concise essays by European and American scholars demonstrates how some of America‘s most well-known and influential novels responded to and participated in the radical transformations that characterized American culture between the early republic and the age of imperial expansion. Part I consists of 7 systematic essays on key historical and critical frameworks ― including debates aboutrace and citizenship, transnationalism, environmentalism and print culture, as well as sentimentalism, romance and the gothic, realism and naturalism. Part II provides 22 essays on individual novels, each combining an introduction to relevant cultural contexts with a fresh close reading and the discussion of critical perspectives shaped by literary and cultural theory.

This handbook offers students and researchers compact orientation in their study of intermedial phenomena in Anglophone literary texts and cultures by introducing them to current academic debates, theoretical concepts and methodologies. By combining theory with text analysis and contextual anchoring, it introduces students and scholars alike to a vast field of research which encompasses concepts such as intermediality, multi- and plurimediality, intermedial reference, transmediality, ekphrasis, as well as related concepts such as visual culture, remediation, adaptation, and multimodality, which are all discussed in connection with literary examples. Hence each of the 30 contributions spans both a theoretical approach and concrete analysis of literary texts from different centuries and different Anglophone cultures.

The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature will offer a cutting-edge assessment of the period's literature, offering readers practical insights and proactive strategies for exploring novels, poems, and other literary creations.

Increasing specialization within the discipline of English and American Studies has shifted the focus of scholarly discussion toward theoretical reflection and cultural contexts. These developments have benefitted the discipline in more ways than one, but they have also resulted in a certain neglect of close reading. As a result, students and researchers interested in such material are forced to turn to scholarship from the 1960s and 1970s, much of which relies on dated methodological and ideological presuppositions. The handbook aims to fill this gap by providing new readings of texts that figure prominently in the literature classroom and in scholarly debate − from James’s The Ambassadors to McCarthy’s The Road. These readings do not revert naively to a time “before theory.” Instead, they distil the insights of literary and cultural theory into concise introductions to the historical background, the themes, the formal strategies, and the reception of influential literary texts, and they do so in a jargon-free language accessible to readers on all levels of qualification.

The Cambridge Handbook of American Literature offers a compact and accessible guide to the major landmarks of American literature.

Part I of this authoritative handbook offers systematic essays, which deal with major historical, social, philosophical, political, cultural and aesthetic contexts of the English novel between 1830 and 1900. The essays offer a wide scope of aspects such as the Industrial Revolution, religion and secularisation, science, technology, medicine, evolution or the increasing mediatisation of the lifeworld. Part II, then, leads through the work of more than 25 eminent Victorian novelists. Each of these chapters provides both historical and biographical contextualisation, overview, close reading and analysis. They also encourage further research as they look upon the work of the respective authors at issue from the perspectives of cultural and literary theory.